Secretly taped NY lawmakers, operatives are named

Nine New York City Democrats, including state senators, a city council member and two political operatives, were secretly recorded by a former lawmaker seeking leniency for her role in a corruption scandal, and nearly all of them are under criminal investigation, according to court documents filed Wednesday.

The names were released over the objections of federal prosecutors who said in a separate filing a day earlier that eight of the nine were under criminal investigation and their names should not be made public. The names include state Sens. Malcolm Smith and John Sampson, who have already been charged in separate cases with crimes including bribery and embezzlement. They have pleaded not guilty.

Names of the other people secretly recorded by ex-Sen. Shirley Huntley and released Wednesday were: State Sens. Eric Adams, Ruth Hassel-Thompson, Jose Peralta and Velmanette Montgomery; City Council member Rubin Wills, who was Huntley’s chief of staff before he ran for the council in a 2010 special election; former political consultant Melvin Lowe; and Curtis Taylor, a former press adviser to Smith.

Adams, a Brooklyn Democrat who had once been a captain in the New York Police Department, is an outspoken critic of the department’s stop, question and frisk policy and testified recently in a federal trial challenging the tactic. Peralta is an up-and-coming Latino leader. Hassel-Thompson and Montgomery are civil rights advocates — Montgomery for those accused of crimes, and tho for minorities.

It marks the second time the government has acknowledged using a legislator to record conversations with colleagues as part of a criminal probe.

Adams said he had not been contacted about any investigation. “I believe deeply in transparency and the pursuit of justice — and that is why I committed 20 years of my life to law enforcement,” he said. “I am more than willing to help with any investigation.”

Wills said his lawyer was in contact with federal officials and he is not the target of any investigation from Huntley’s recordings. “I look forward to continuing the work of the people of southeast Queens that elected me,” he said.

Peralta said he was confident authorities will find that he has engaged in no wrongdoing.

Hassell-Thompson admitted that Huntley invited her to lunch in 2012 and that they talked about their health and families. But, she said, “At no time — past or present — did we discuss anything inappropriate, improper or illegal.”

Smith declined to comment.

The others didn’t immediately returned messages from The Associated Press seeking comment. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn said he could not reveal which one of the nine wasn’t under investigation.

Senate Democratic spokesman Mike Murphy called the disclosure part of “an extremely trying time in Albany.”

“If any charges are brought, the conference will take appropriate action,” Murphy said.

The names appear in a previously sealed letter written by Huntley’s lawyer ahead of her sentencing on Thursday, in an effort to show Huntley’s cooperation with authorities. The Queens Democrat admitted embezzling nearly $88,000 from a state-funded nonprofit she controlled when she pleaded guilty to mail fraud conspiracy last winter. Huntley took office in 2007 and lost a re-election bid last year.

The government revealed last week that she made the recordings in a bid for leniency. They said in a court filing that the recordings of three of the eight individuals yielded evidence “useful to law enforcement authorities.”

A paragraph related to the ongoing investigation of the three elected officials remained sealed.

“Every legislator who has conversed with this defendant will necessarily assume that he or she was recorded,” he wrote. “There will be no surprises to the potentially accused by the revelations of their names.”

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn noted that the council has already stripped Wills of his position on the council’s budget negotiating team and his ability to allocate money to community groups in his district. Those powers were revoked last year, after it became known that the state attorney general was looking into what had become of roughly $30,000 in state money that Huntley arranged to allocate to a nonprofit Wills led.

“If further action needs to be taken, I can’t comment on that yet because I need to get that information,” Quinn said.